Three pages of stereotype. Here, let me summarize and save you wasting 5 minutes of your life. . . . . . "IT people are not the best communicators." [. ..] From experience, when managers "force" technical people to do something or provide something, the end result is a piece of garbage [. ..] This person doesn't get that most of the reasons IT folks "don't communicate" with those outside of IT is for a very basic reason . . . . . we start talking and we get BLANK STARES
Isn't this a perfect example of the problem?
Not all stereotypes are accurate, and they are certainly unfair to just blanket apply to all members of a particular group, virtually guaranteeing whatever accuracy they may have had has been diluted to nothing. At the same time, they do not tend to appear out of the ether. A stereotype exists for a reason.
Take your response as an example, an attempt to deny and refute the article. Let me do the same to your quotes above as you did to the article: "IT people do not communicate with others because when they do the others don't understand and every time somebody else tries to get involved they fuck it up and produce garbage!" Isn't that exactly the attitude the article you're dismissing refers to? "This is my fiefdom and I don't want you involved because you clearly can't do it right" is a pretty damn strong case for saying that IT managers are aloof and poor communicators.
Let me give you the perspective of the dean and other upper-level management folks: If you try to talk to them and you get blank stares in return, you are doing it wrong. If an IT manager is a highly technically competent person, that is an amazing advantage -- but they are, first and foremost, a manager. If their primary function was getting into the nuts and bolts, their position would not exist or at best would be called a "team leader." This person is a manager, and part of that is the ability to talk to those above them in terms that they understand. They do not need a boatload of technical details, they need a business case for what you are proposing. Why do we have to spend more on System A than System B? If it is physical interoperability, just say so. They do not need the specifics, and they will certainly understand "we need this set of features to talk to the systems we already have in place." Understand that they are not technical people, that is why they hired you, but that that does not mean they are not capable or should not be kept involved in the process. They like fancy charts and powerpoint presentations, not technical specification sheets.
If the IT managers are not willing or capable of filling that role as a go-between between upper level management and ground-level workers, they are in the wrong position. That happens a lot, particularly since a lot of organizations see a managerial position as something you promote a good worker into as a reward for that work. That does not make them good managers, not by a long shot. Luckily, it also does not take a lot of effort to figure out how to talk to non-technical people such that they understand what is going on and are involved in the process. A lot of IT workers want IT to remain a mysterious black hole that nobody quite understands in some attempt at job security, but the reality is that if they do not see the value in what you do you're going to be the first ones out the door if times get tough. Possibly to their great detriment, but that is of small consolation to a swath of suddenly unemployed workers.
A great IT manager is a good manager and a good technical person, able to liason between those two groups. A good IT manager is a good manager who isn't great with IT -- somebody able to keep upper management happy and, more importantly, off his workers' backs but who might not be technical enough to avoid his staff putting one over on him. A bad IT manager is somebody who can't manage worth a shit but is good with technology; they just end up micromanaging and getting in the way of the people actually hired to do the work, helping neither side at all.
The fact that I have the ability to go beyond my job scope should be the merits used for salary negotiations.
Are you be chance a recent college graduate? You seem to have a naive, idealistic view of the world typically reserved for recent college graduates. Though to be fair, a lot of Slashdotters of all ages do as well.
Let me help you out. Truth does not matter. Should does not matter. All that matters is reality.
For what it's worth, I agree with you completely. That's exactly how things should work, and in the case of salaried employees the employer should not care if the work is getting done in forty hours or fourteen. However, we do not live in a world where the employer and the employee have equal power or even equal respect, and that has been exacerbated even further by a terrible economy. If you operate in the world of how things should go, reality is going to give you a harsh reality check. If you are in a position to lose this job to make a stand for how things should work, by all means. It doesn't sound that way, however.
The only way to get through a terrible economy in through self preservation and accumulating the necessities to weather the storm.
And you don't think that handing your employer something awesome and not demanding to be paid for it would constitute a means of self-preservation?
As others have pointed out, there are a number of reasons to can you already -- and I'm ignoring the part where you come off as a self-entitled twat. If you have "lots of down time" there is a definite interest in re-evaluating whether or not you're needed for the time you do spend working. I won't bring up the question of what you do when you're not doing real work or why you feel that twiddling your thumbs for those hours is not only proper, but that you should then come to me with this tool you made sure to write on your own time just to get more cash out of me when you know it's not there. For that matter, if you did come to me and even if I did buy the software, it would just make you more expendable. There is always a risk of automating yourself right out of a job, and you're apparently not doing that much work to begin with. Any fraction may tip the scales, and that has nothing to do with whether or not the work you are completing is done well.
And then, of course, we come to reality. You come to me, demand I pay you. I say I can't, which you already knew--or should have, anyway. You then...what? Tell me to fuck myself and stick the software in a drawer? You seem very self-confident with your grasp on things, so let me ask you this: Can you think of a single way to get yourself fired faster? Oh, maybe not right away. Maybe not even directly because of it. But you just walked into your bosses office with a sign around your neck saying that you are the most expendable person next time they need to fire somebody. Even in a good economy, few employers would put up with that level of self-centeredness. We're not in a good economy. We're in an economy where there would be a line outside your bosses door with candidates to replace you before you had cleaned out your desk -- candidates who would happily write this software, give it to the company and consider themselves lucky to have had the opportunity. It's sad that being a "team player" has come to mean that you do everything your bosses want and they do nothing in return for you, but that is the reality in the many--and probably most--cases.
You're not getting money for this. That ship not only sailed, it was never in your port to begin with. Trying is only likely to get you screwed even harder. Realistically you have two choices at this point: One, pretend you never wasted your time writing this software. Do whatever you want with it, so long as your bosses never find out it exists. Shred it, GPL it, see if it meets the needs of some other organizations. Or two, walk into y
Yep, exactly. I didn't have a great deal of domains with them--five--but they are now all hosted with Gandi. Next step, to send them a message telling them exactly why.
You're not wrong, but this guy also seems to think better of his addon than he really should.
His little addon works, at least somewhat, for those sites with a single static IP. It fails at doing anything about the millions and millions of websites, and probably the majority of sites that a bill like SOPA would seek to eliminate, that run on vhosts behind a single IP. Going to the IP of the domain I use for email and as a homepage gets me a wonderful Apache error message; with other hosts, it likely gets a nice little advertisement for the host. He does mention this on the Addon page. However his response is basically "then they should buy a static IP and be compatible with DeSopa!" Well, good luck with that. Those people who haven't found a need for one yet aren't going to suddenly do so now. At least not in appreciable numbers.
Beyond that, I wonder if all functionality works even for sites this would help. Just as an example, do cookies still get forwarded to the site and received from the site properly? If my browser can't resolve the domain properly it may refuse to accept or send back those cookies, meaning any site that requires them to function (a depressing number overall, but maybe not among websites likely to be targeted by SOPA) is still useless. It looks as though the addon functions by simply going "oop, thepiratebay.com -- let's redirect to 1.2.3.4 instead" rather than act as a kind of mini-DNS that actually tries to intercept the lookup and return the IP (which he says does not appear feasible due to a lack of hooks--sounds accurate enough).
The biggest thing, though, is simply that he gets caught up in the same thing that a lot of geeks do: SOPA is a clearly imperfect piece of legislation so it's not worth doing*. It's relatively easy to bypass, I admit--just change DNS servers to somewhere that doesn't give two shits about SOPA--but how many people know how to do that? How many people even know that it can be done? If this blocks even a third of people who would otherwise use these sites, isn't it a huge success from the perspective of the people who want this legislation?
SOPA is an abomination, and it is likely not going to have any effect on anybody who reads Slashdot or similar sites. It may not affect those peoples' family and friends. It will have an effect, and for no cost and little effort from the people who want it passed. They don't need perfection. And the cynic in me supposes that once it gets passed, the RIAA and MPAA and those groups will march back to Congress and say "people are bypassing your law, you need to mandate that ISPs filter DNS requests that go outside their servers!" and a new, even bigger abomination will be passed with considerably less effort in the name of "closing loopholes" and enforcing already-passed legislation, with little debate as to the merits of the new OR previous legislation.
Should he and people like him still make their addons and other programs to help bypass SOPA? Yes, absolutely. They just shouldn't stand around tooting their horns about how this will teach Congress a lesson about how it is technically infeasible to enforce. They don't give a shit if there are workarounds. The real effort should be in stopping idiocy like this from becoming law in the first place, and I hope they are at least involved in that area as well.
* From the perspective of those who want to do it. I do not think it's worth doing at all; I in no way support it.
Product Bundling - This is tricky. Sure, their products integrate. But then again you need to sign up for each one separately. There's no "Use search and automatically get this other product"..
I guess that depends on your definitions. Simply using search, no, that doesn't come with anything else (other than links to their services and according to the Google executive quote in the summary, deliberately prominent ones). But the second you sign up for an account for any one service you're signed in to all of them. My Google account is Gmail, search, Docs, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, etc.
One could probably also make a case that their monopoly on search and advertising are different and that one drives the other, if one was so inclined. (Put into accusation-speak, that Google is using their search monopoly to create an online advertising monopoly.)
That said, I do agree: I really see little evidence of abuse of any potential monopoly that they have. To the extent that they are a monopoly at all, it seems to be one of merit, being better than the competition, and not one born of competing unfairly. It bears watching but not action, in my opinion.
They probably should be investigated. That is, after all, among the government's jobs. Beyond that I reserve judgments about the merits until I see the conclusions.
Then you don't even have to follow your own precedents.
Why should the Supreme Court have to follow precedent? Do you really want to create an institution that can never revisit the decisions made by people who lived hundreds of years ago? There has to be somebody in the chain who can go "yeah, that last decision was bullshit." We've chosen to make that the Supreme Court and not any lower court. Seems reasonable.
If it seems they do it disproportionately more than they uphold their previous decisions, it's because the Supreme Court only takes cases with a constitutional question to answer -- and "we got it wrong" is infinitely more valuable than "the decision is the same as last time." There is little point taking a case if a significant number of justices don't believe there is a distinct possibility of a different outcome. In short, "no, we won't hear your case" is also equivalent to "the decision stands."
I just ran into a bug during the Greybeards quest line. I don't want to ruin it if you haven't gotten there yet because I think it's actually a cool story, but I'm basically supposed to travel back in time and observe something (in cinematic form), then I get popped back to the present for a fight and the rest of the story.
Long story short, after six or seven resets I could never get the cinematic to happen. It would animate the time travel, but then I would just sit there. None of the things I was supposed to be seeing or hearing were happening, menus were locked out (for example I could get to the system menu but I couldn't navigate to the quest menu--not that I really wanted to but I was hitting keys at this point), character menu, etc were all locked. I was just stuck there.
I also crash randomly. It happens, eh, once every three or four hours of play I would imagine. I suppose it might be an addon issue but the only one I have installed is one to make children killable (little bastards better talk nice!) and I doubt that would be the culprit.
The menus are also troublesome on the PC. It's pretty clear they were built for a console and they don't always navigate properly. I end up with situations where my mouse is over one entry but the active entry is still several entries above it, so when I click I get the wrong dialogue option.
It is a very, very good game overall -- but I can't pretend it isn't buggy.
They might be interested, but they aren't going to have standing to sue (at least if the Australian system operates anything like the US one); they aren't the party harmed.
When ever I hear someone talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs, especially no-skill or low-skill jobs, I ask them if they hope their own children will one day work in such a job. They always say no.
Of course nobody wants their child to be a factory worker. They are all meant to grow up and be president or win the Superbowl.
Now ask them if they would like jobs to be available when reality hits and it turns out that little Johnny is going to be in the majority of Americans who never have a high-paying job or a nice office. Ask if they have enough tucked away in that retirement fund (what, no retirement fund?!) to support 40 year old Johnny because, gosh, he's too good for that kind of work!
Nobody wants their kid to have a job like that. Nobody should want their kid to have a job like that. But it's a hell of a lot better than long-term unemployment. Service jobs and intellectual property can only employ so many people, and it's only going to get worse.
I agree completely. I am often baffled by the flamewars that start on Slashdot about what the GPL does or does not mean, does or does not permit, does or does not require in situation A, B, C. A site that is disproportionately in favor of the license can't even agree what it means -- and every single one of the people arguing end their post with "just read the license!"
How are non-technical folks going to know? Why take that risk?
I would require proof of employment, probably for a relatively substantial period of time--say, a year in this case--and make the decision based on that. Lack of history would certainly make it higher-risk (and thus demand a higher interest payment) and the employment history would have to be particularly satisfactory. I also would be unlikely to give big loans to this hypothetical person without substantial history, as well as savings or other collateral. I'm probably not going to give somebody a mortgage without any lending history whatsoever. Generally speaking though, it is an impediment to lending but not a disqualifier.
That said, how many people truly have no history of borrowing? No mobile phone? No car payments? No car insurance payments? No student loans? Nothing they pay each month in their name? Those are all debts -- albeit small ones and with small risks attached for the "lenders," but debts nonetheless and they can exemplify the potential borrower's behavior with regard to paying their obligations. It has to be pretty rare to get somebody who literally has nothing else to look at, and even moreso when you have a person like that wanting a serious loan.
I guess it depends on what we're including in the cost. I went to Illinois State in the early 2000s, an in-state school and not a top-end one. All told it cost me in the area of $10,000 a year, which included the tuition and the various fees, and housing. Looking at the webpage for the current rates*, it looks like about $18,500 for tuition + board (I'm honestly shocked, wow). The breakdown is about $10k tuition + $8k housing.
Obviously if you take housing out, that fee would drop substantially -- but that is a limited opportunity for people who happen to go to a school close enough to commute to. Otherwise the choice is living in an apartment nearby and you're just shifting the housing cost into somebody else's pocket; it's still an expense of attending school.
By comparison, looking at the University of Illinois website right now (which is a good school) tuition/fees run $13,658 for residents, which does not include housing. For a room you share with somebody else and a meal plan, tack on another $9,714 a year for a total of $23,372. Per year.
None of these numbers include books or doing anything other than marching from class to class and back to your dorm with an occasional stop to eat (not that I advocate putting anything else into your debt), by the way. So they are all I'd say around $1,000 a year low for books alone. (And incidentally the stat I was given when I started college was that only something like 20% of students would actually complete their degree in four years.)
I'm sure that location affects things somewhat (Illinois is not a cheap state and I'm sure something like South Dakota would be cheaper), but perhaps the disconnect hinges on "debt." I think it's pretty easily demonstrable that the cost of these educations can very easily reach and exceed $60,000 over a four-year period without going to Harvard or Yale or any such. Whether or not you go into that much debt depends on a lot of things, chief among them whether or not you are also working while you attend college and how much, how much various financial aid you manage to accrue, and of course if you spend a lot of time going out and partying or anything that like that eats into your money and prompts you to let more of the other monies come from debt instead of income.
I'm perfectly willing to assume that prices may be a lot cheaper elsewhere, but unless you attend Bumblefuck Egypt School of Whatever as an in-state student living at home, or are trying to compare the costs of a 1970 education to todays (just look at the comparison from early 2000s to now!), I have an extremely hard time believing something like 15-20k for an entire four year degree is within the realm of feasibility. If you're paying nothing but tuition, yeah, maybe.
There is a difference between a freshman entering school and not knowing what to study, and that same person cruising around for the next 4 years without ever thinking "shit, how is my education going to get me a job with which to repay by debt?"
I don't disagree, but at the same time most colleges are just fucking terrible at teaching you skills needed to get and do well in a job; their reward primarily is the piece of paper at the end and possibly some connections you make in the interim, not what you are actually taught. When this is brought up to people we tend to be told that university isn't job training, it's about getting an education, and that people who want that should go attend a vocational school. There is a disconnect there. People should go tens of thousands into debt to "upgrade" to a four-year degree that doesn't teach them things they're going to use in their job, but still need to make sure they choose a degree that is going to get them a job? It's not logically impossible, but it is clear evidence of a problem (that universities are happy to exploit).
* Here's a good one, and a great example of another problem. I used their "cost estimator" and told them I
And how much more effort and money would it have taken to get the project off the ground going that route? Would Facebook even exist if it had to be done in Java or PHP? Would it have entered the market at an appropriate time? There are a lot of things that derail could derail the process, especially a process begun essentially for lulz. Yeah, if somebody had promised Zuckerberg that Facebook would soon be valued in the billions he might have made other choices, but there are no such guarantees in life.
As it stands, he used a language he was clearly familiar with and for which there is ample and comparably cheap developers available and he got his product out and dominates the market. I doubt he is sitting around going "fuck, I can't believe I didn't write this is Java!" It worked out pretty damn well for him, and the rest of us get a tool to make our PHP projects better.
If you're writing a program you know will need to scale like this, yeah, maybe Java or C++ is the best choice. Beyond that I consider fretting over language instead of getting something done to be a premature optimisation.
Potential employers will care about her sexual problems? That's a major issue, but nothing at all to do with this person's blog.
Beyond that, yes, things on the Internet about you can be found and bitter exes may well write nasty things; it is part of the risk of opening oneself up to a relationship. That doesn't mean that anything written about you that you do not like is illegal and unprotected speech. As I said before, if it's harassment arrest him for harassment; if it's a restraining order issue violate him for the restraining order; and I'll add if it's libel, sue him for libel and you will have your recourse there to have the blog removed.
If it is none of those things, it is an unfortunate consequence of free speech that sometimes people use it to be assholes. I bust this quote out a lot, it's one of my favorites, and I think it is relevant again here:
The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.
(I had the citation recorded as "Lord Chief Justice Hailsham" but am not sure it is accurate anymore; it may be Quintin Hogg, who served as Lord Chancellor and an MP in Britain. In any event I see great wisdom in the words.)
For what it is worth, I agree with you. However I still don't agree with the premise that ordering the blog deleted does not overstep a boundary.
If it was harassment, he should be arrested for harassment. If it was a violation of his restraining order, he should be violated and locked up. If he does it again, it should all happen again -- harsher and harsher.
To me, the blog itself was not the harassment; he could have sat around on somedouchebaghateshisex.blogspot.com forever ranting into the wind and I doubt anybody would have cared. It was the way he essentially stalked her via sending his nonsense to her family and friends that crossed the line. That being the case, that is the behavior that should be punished and stopped. His right to be a dickhead and write his drivel should not.
And you don't see the difference between a US regulatory agency looking into a merger between two American companies and an EU agency doing the same?
The EU is welcome to do whatever they please, but it does not alter the question of why. (Based on other posts it seems the answer in this case is "because Google asked them to," though that has nothing at all to do with what the Justice Department is or is not doing.)
With a highly unpredictable regime, I'm not sure "try to starve their army to death" is the right approach. Sad and selfish as it is to say, the North Korean people suffering may be the lesser of two evils in this circumstance.
Likewise, one thing that the North Korean regime has been exceptionally good at is deflecting blame. A wholly disconcerting number of the North Korean people really do believe that their suffering is because of the United States and a puppet South Korea. Furthering that suffering may well generate the anger you would be hoping to generate, but there is no guarantee that it is directed at the people it should be directed to.
Honestly, just waiting the North out is probably the best approach. I think Kim Jong-Il is regarded as pretty damn psychopathic, and I don't mean that short of its literal sense. There is simply no telling what he will do. He is also 70 years old. Short of him deciding to go out in a big bang, the amount of harm he can do, personally, is coming to a close. His children are western-educated. This is by no means a guarantee that they will be any better, but it is at least an indication that they understand the depth of the lie they are living in North Korea and has to offer at least some hope that, at bare minimum, they will be more reasonable people to deal with.
If not, once more about them and their ruling style and personalities are known, other measures can be considered. Until then, the status quo is good enough I'm afraid.
Politics and booksmarts don't seem to have anything in common, as far as I can tell.
Well, that's certainly true, but you seem to be suggesting that not knowing how to use a computer or being a movie star or a wrestler means that one lacks booksmarts. This is not necessarily true.
Further, the idea that "[i]f politicians were booksmart they wouldn't need to pay analysts" is also untrue. For starters, people are not good at everything, much less expert-level at everything in the way that, you know, experts are. Second, these studies very often come back with reports that are hundreds of pages long. Particularly when we start talking about governors and presidents, who have to deal with EVERYTHING, they simply do not have the time to go through all of these things by hand. They need knowledgable people to go through it for them and give them basically the cliffsnotes version.
Jury nullification is not designed to be anything because it was not designed at all. It is an unintended consequence born from exploiting a loophole created by a legal concept too important to risk mucking around with.
In the US, if an attorney suggests nullification, they run afoul of their bar associations. Judges are prohibited from informing juries about it. A Second District appeals court decision supports removing a juror if they intend to nullify, and many judges will declare a mistrial if it has been mentioned.
The power of jury nullification certainly exists, and nobody is claiming otherwise -- but it is not an intended power, not in the US. It is a de facto power created by the loophole that a jury's findings of fact can not be re-examined and as long as they can get away with it until decision time, whatever they say and for whatever reason they say it stands.
Okay, I have noted those things. Now can you explain to me why I should care?
The vast majority of his post was statements of fact that can be proven true or false. If you have something to say about the information he provides, by all means, enlighten us.
If your complaint is that he might be paid to post it, I honestly can not be bothered to give a shit. This is not a review site where he is posting fake opinions to make a product seem better or more well-liked than it is. His motives mean nothing; whether or not the information he gives is accurate does, and that is independent of whether or not he is a shill. (Getting facts out about a product is also called "marketing," if one is not instantly out to make it be a nasty thing.)
Not that I'm defending those practices--they were silly then and they're downright stupid now--but I don't think they're quite the same thing.
"Made for Internet Explorer"-style "exclusives" were about the fact that browsers refuses to play nicely and render things the same way. Even insofar as a site could be made to look right in disperate browsers, it was a question of time/effort/cost versus reward. Especially for hobbyist sites that just wanted to toss something on the Web, that was often a real challenge. If there's no money involved, spending tons of effort on it makes little sense. And with few exceptions, websites in those days still worked pretty well in the other browsers, there were just a few, usually visual, things off about it.
Exclusives for consoles or, potentially, books isn't about the difficulty or cost/benefit of porting the works to some other platform. Particularly with books, the effort is nearly nil (and while there is a distinct effort for games it is done by the vast majority of major titles--meaning the cost/benefit is typically there). Rather, it is about the profits of one vendor over the others and whether or not they can pay you enough for the exclusive that the cost/benefit no longer works.
In other words, one "exclusivity" is because of technical and time limitations and the other is because someone handed you a big enough bag with dollar signs on it. They may have similar results, but I wouldn't say they're similar things.
A lot of trojans may operate that way (it's certainly the path of least resistance) but social engineering is not a requirement for something to be a trojan.
If it really did enter a system, have a peek around and open it up for Stuxnet why would trojan be a misnomer?
"Military Technologies" [. ..] would seem to be a strong signal that the person pursuing it is interested in going into the military.
I disagree. If all the student wanted was to go into the military there are far easier ways. Simply enlisting would work and would not require college at all. (As a bonus if they want to go to college afterward they have a number of programs to help them pay for it.) If they are intent on being an officer, they would have done ROTC. Technically OCS (Officer Candidate School) does exist for college graduates who did not go the ROTC route, but that is by far the hardest path, has a very selective criteria, and there are other majors that would get you in with much greater certainty.
I'd say that a "military technologies" degree (and wtf is that, anyway?!) would be for people who are supremely interested in the military, but who who not want to join or who are physically incapable of joining. It might be a (misguided?) attempt to enter a private-sector job working with the military, or perhaps a more business-oriented career that ties in. Knowing in detail what the military does and how they do it might help you if you're trying to sell them things, as a simple example.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this a perfect example of the problem?
Not all stereotypes are accurate, and they are certainly unfair to just blanket apply to all members of a particular group, virtually guaranteeing whatever accuracy they may have had has been diluted to nothing. At the same time, they do not tend to appear out of the ether. A stereotype exists for a reason.
Take your response as an example, an attempt to deny and refute the article. Let me do the same to your quotes above as you did to the article: "IT people do not communicate with others because when they do the others don't understand and every time somebody else tries to get involved they fuck it up and produce garbage!" Isn't that exactly the attitude the article you're dismissing refers to? "This is my fiefdom and I don't want you involved because you clearly can't do it right" is a pretty damn strong case for saying that IT managers are aloof and poor communicators.
Let me give you the perspective of the dean and other upper-level management folks: If you try to talk to them and you get blank stares in return, you are doing it wrong. If an IT manager is a highly technically competent person, that is an amazing advantage -- but they are, first and foremost, a manager. If their primary function was getting into the nuts and bolts, their position would not exist or at best would be called a "team leader." This person is a manager, and part of that is the ability to talk to those above them in terms that they understand. They do not need a boatload of technical details, they need a business case for what you are proposing. Why do we have to spend more on System A than System B? If it is physical interoperability, just say so. They do not need the specifics, and they will certainly understand "we need this set of features to talk to the systems we already have in place." Understand that they are not technical people, that is why they hired you, but that that does not mean they are not capable or should not be kept involved in the process. They like fancy charts and powerpoint presentations, not technical specification sheets.
If the IT managers are not willing or capable of filling that role as a go-between between upper level management and ground-level workers, they are in the wrong position. That happens a lot, particularly since a lot of organizations see a managerial position as something you promote a good worker into as a reward for that work. That does not make them good managers, not by a long shot. Luckily, it also does not take a lot of effort to figure out how to talk to non-technical people such that they understand what is going on and are involved in the process. A lot of IT workers want IT to remain a mysterious black hole that nobody quite understands in some attempt at job security, but the reality is that if they do not see the value in what you do you're going to be the first ones out the door if times get tough. Possibly to their great detriment, but that is of small consolation to a swath of suddenly unemployed workers.
A great IT manager is a good manager and a good technical person, able to liason between those two groups. A good IT manager is a good manager who isn't great with IT -- somebody able to keep upper management happy and, more importantly, off his workers' backs but who might not be technical enough to avoid his staff putting one over on him. A bad IT manager is somebody who can't manage worth a shit but is good with technology; they just end up micromanaging and getting in the way of the people actually hired to do the work, helping neither side at all.
Are you be chance a recent college graduate? You seem to have a naive, idealistic view of the world typically reserved for recent college graduates. Though to be fair, a lot of Slashdotters of all ages do as well.
Let me help you out. Truth does not matter. Should does not matter. All that matters is reality.
For what it's worth, I agree with you completely. That's exactly how things should work, and in the case of salaried employees the employer should not care if the work is getting done in forty hours or fourteen. However, we do not live in a world where the employer and the employee have equal power or even equal respect, and that has been exacerbated even further by a terrible economy. If you operate in the world of how things should go, reality is going to give you a harsh reality check. If you are in a position to lose this job to make a stand for how things should work, by all means. It doesn't sound that way, however.
And you don't think that handing your employer something awesome and not demanding to be paid for it would constitute a means of self-preservation?
As others have pointed out, there are a number of reasons to can you already -- and I'm ignoring the part where you come off as a self-entitled twat. If you have "lots of down time" there is a definite interest in re-evaluating whether or not you're needed for the time you do spend working. I won't bring up the question of what you do when you're not doing real work or why you feel that twiddling your thumbs for those hours is not only proper, but that you should then come to me with this tool you made sure to write on your own time just to get more cash out of me when you know it's not there. For that matter, if you did come to me and even if I did buy the software, it would just make you more expendable. There is always a risk of automating yourself right out of a job, and you're apparently not doing that much work to begin with. Any fraction may tip the scales, and that has nothing to do with whether or not the work you are completing is done well.
And then, of course, we come to reality. You come to me, demand I pay you. I say I can't, which you already knew--or should have, anyway. You then...what? Tell me to fuck myself and stick the software in a drawer? You seem very self-confident with your grasp on things, so let me ask you this: Can you think of a single way to get yourself fired faster? Oh, maybe not right away. Maybe not even directly because of it. But you just walked into your bosses office with a sign around your neck saying that you are the most expendable person next time they need to fire somebody. Even in a good economy, few employers would put up with that level of self-centeredness. We're not in a good economy. We're in an economy where there would be a line outside your bosses door with candidates to replace you before you had cleaned out your desk -- candidates who would happily write this software, give it to the company and consider themselves lucky to have had the opportunity. It's sad that being a "team player" has come to mean that you do everything your bosses want and they do nothing in return for you, but that is the reality in the many--and probably most--cases.
You're not getting money for this. That ship not only sailed, it was never in your port to begin with. Trying is only likely to get you screwed even harder. Realistically you have two choices at this point: One, pretend you never wasted your time writing this software. Do whatever you want with it, so long as your bosses never find out it exists. Shred it, GPL it, see if it meets the needs of some other organizations. Or two, walk into y
Yep, exactly. I didn't have a great deal of domains with them--five--but they are now all hosted with Gandi. Next step, to send them a message telling them exactly why.
You're not wrong, but this guy also seems to think better of his addon than he really should.
His little addon works, at least somewhat, for those sites with a single static IP. It fails at doing anything about the millions and millions of websites, and probably the majority of sites that a bill like SOPA would seek to eliminate, that run on vhosts behind a single IP. Going to the IP of the domain I use for email and as a homepage gets me a wonderful Apache error message; with other hosts, it likely gets a nice little advertisement for the host. He does mention this on the Addon page. However his response is basically "then they should buy a static IP and be compatible with DeSopa!" Well, good luck with that. Those people who haven't found a need for one yet aren't going to suddenly do so now. At least not in appreciable numbers.
Beyond that, I wonder if all functionality works even for sites this would help. Just as an example, do cookies still get forwarded to the site and received from the site properly? If my browser can't resolve the domain properly it may refuse to accept or send back those cookies, meaning any site that requires them to function (a depressing number overall, but maybe not among websites likely to be targeted by SOPA) is still useless. It looks as though the addon functions by simply going "oop, thepiratebay.com -- let's redirect to 1.2.3.4 instead" rather than act as a kind of mini-DNS that actually tries to intercept the lookup and return the IP (which he says does not appear feasible due to a lack of hooks--sounds accurate enough).
The biggest thing, though, is simply that he gets caught up in the same thing that a lot of geeks do: SOPA is a clearly imperfect piece of legislation so it's not worth doing*. It's relatively easy to bypass, I admit--just change DNS servers to somewhere that doesn't give two shits about SOPA--but how many people know how to do that? How many people even know that it can be done? If this blocks even a third of people who would otherwise use these sites, isn't it a huge success from the perspective of the people who want this legislation?
SOPA is an abomination, and it is likely not going to have any effect on anybody who reads Slashdot or similar sites. It may not affect those peoples' family and friends. It will have an effect, and for no cost and little effort from the people who want it passed. They don't need perfection. And the cynic in me supposes that once it gets passed, the RIAA and MPAA and those groups will march back to Congress and say "people are bypassing your law, you need to mandate that ISPs filter DNS requests that go outside their servers!" and a new, even bigger abomination will be passed with considerably less effort in the name of "closing loopholes" and enforcing already-passed legislation, with little debate as to the merits of the new OR previous legislation.
Should he and people like him still make their addons and other programs to help bypass SOPA? Yes, absolutely. They just shouldn't stand around tooting their horns about how this will teach Congress a lesson about how it is technically infeasible to enforce. They don't give a shit if there are workarounds. The real effort should be in stopping idiocy like this from becoming law in the first place, and I hope they are at least involved in that area as well.
* From the perspective of those who want to do it. I do not think it's worth doing at all; I in no way support it.
I guess that depends on your definitions. Simply using search, no, that doesn't come with anything else (other than links to their services and according to the Google executive quote in the summary, deliberately prominent ones). But the second you sign up for an account for any one service you're signed in to all of them. My Google account is Gmail, search, Docs, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, etc.
One could probably also make a case that their monopoly on search and advertising are different and that one drives the other, if one was so inclined. (Put into accusation-speak, that Google is using their search monopoly to create an online advertising monopoly.)
That said, I do agree: I really see little evidence of abuse of any potential monopoly that they have. To the extent that they are a monopoly at all, it seems to be one of merit, being better than the competition, and not one born of competing unfairly. It bears watching but not action, in my opinion.
They probably should be investigated. That is, after all, among the government's jobs. Beyond that I reserve judgments about the merits until I see the conclusions.
Why should the Supreme Court have to follow precedent? Do you really want to create an institution that can never revisit the decisions made by people who lived hundreds of years ago? There has to be somebody in the chain who can go "yeah, that last decision was bullshit." We've chosen to make that the Supreme Court and not any lower court. Seems reasonable.
If it seems they do it disproportionately more than they uphold their previous decisions, it's because the Supreme Court only takes cases with a constitutional question to answer -- and "we got it wrong" is infinitely more valuable than "the decision is the same as last time." There is little point taking a case if a significant number of justices don't believe there is a distinct possibility of a different outcome. In short, "no, we won't hear your case" is also equivalent to "the decision stands."
I just ran into a bug during the Greybeards quest line. I don't want to ruin it if you haven't gotten there yet because I think it's actually a cool story, but I'm basically supposed to travel back in time and observe something (in cinematic form), then I get popped back to the present for a fight and the rest of the story.
Long story short, after six or seven resets I could never get the cinematic to happen. It would animate the time travel, but then I would just sit there. None of the things I was supposed to be seeing or hearing were happening, menus were locked out (for example I could get to the system menu but I couldn't navigate to the quest menu--not that I really wanted to but I was hitting keys at this point), character menu, etc were all locked. I was just stuck there.
I also crash randomly. It happens, eh, once every three or four hours of play I would imagine. I suppose it might be an addon issue but the only one I have installed is one to make children killable (little bastards better talk nice!) and I doubt that would be the culprit.
The menus are also troublesome on the PC. It's pretty clear they were built for a console and they don't always navigate properly. I end up with situations where my mouse is over one entry but the active entry is still several entries above it, so when I click I get the wrong dialogue option.
It is a very, very good game overall -- but I can't pretend it isn't buggy.
They might be interested, but they aren't going to have standing to sue (at least if the Australian system operates anything like the US one); they aren't the party harmed.
Of course nobody wants their child to be a factory worker. They are all meant to grow up and be president or win the Superbowl.
Now ask them if they would like jobs to be available when reality hits and it turns out that little Johnny is going to be in the majority of Americans who never have a high-paying job or a nice office. Ask if they have enough tucked away in that retirement fund (what, no retirement fund?!) to support 40 year old Johnny because, gosh, he's too good for that kind of work!
Nobody wants their kid to have a job like that. Nobody should want their kid to have a job like that. But it's a hell of a lot better than long-term unemployment. Service jobs and intellectual property can only employ so many people, and it's only going to get worse.
I agree completely. I am often baffled by the flamewars that start on Slashdot about what the GPL does or does not mean, does or does not permit, does or does not require in situation A, B, C. A site that is disproportionately in favor of the license can't even agree what it means -- and every single one of the people arguing end their post with "just read the license!"
How are non-technical folks going to know? Why take that risk?
Not the OP, but I have an answer.
I would require proof of employment, probably for a relatively substantial period of time--say, a year in this case--and make the decision based on that. Lack of history would certainly make it higher-risk (and thus demand a higher interest payment) and the employment history would have to be particularly satisfactory. I also would be unlikely to give big loans to this hypothetical person without substantial history, as well as savings or other collateral. I'm probably not going to give somebody a mortgage without any lending history whatsoever. Generally speaking though, it is an impediment to lending but not a disqualifier.
That said, how many people truly have no history of borrowing? No mobile phone? No car payments? No car insurance payments? No student loans? Nothing they pay each month in their name? Those are all debts -- albeit small ones and with small risks attached for the "lenders," but debts nonetheless and they can exemplify the potential borrower's behavior with regard to paying their obligations. It has to be pretty rare to get somebody who literally has nothing else to look at, and even moreso when you have a person like that wanting a serious loan.
I guess it depends on what we're including in the cost. I went to Illinois State in the early 2000s, an in-state school and not a top-end one. All told it cost me in the area of $10,000 a year, which included the tuition and the various fees, and housing. Looking at the webpage for the current rates*, it looks like about $18,500 for tuition + board (I'm honestly shocked, wow). The breakdown is about $10k tuition + $8k housing.
Obviously if you take housing out, that fee would drop substantially -- but that is a limited opportunity for people who happen to go to a school close enough to commute to. Otherwise the choice is living in an apartment nearby and you're just shifting the housing cost into somebody else's pocket; it's still an expense of attending school.
By comparison, looking at the University of Illinois website right now (which is a good school) tuition/fees run $13,658 for residents, which does not include housing. For a room you share with somebody else and a meal plan, tack on another $9,714 a year for a total of $23,372. Per year.
None of these numbers include books or doing anything other than marching from class to class and back to your dorm with an occasional stop to eat (not that I advocate putting anything else into your debt), by the way. So they are all I'd say around $1,000 a year low for books alone. (And incidentally the stat I was given when I started college was that only something like 20% of students would actually complete their degree in four years.)
I'm sure that location affects things somewhat (Illinois is not a cheap state and I'm sure something like South Dakota would be cheaper), but perhaps the disconnect hinges on "debt." I think it's pretty easily demonstrable that the cost of these educations can very easily reach and exceed $60,000 over a four-year period without going to Harvard or Yale or any such. Whether or not you go into that much debt depends on a lot of things, chief among them whether or not you are also working while you attend college and how much, how much various financial aid you manage to accrue, and of course if you spend a lot of time going out and partying or anything that like that eats into your money and prompts you to let more of the other monies come from debt instead of income.
I'm perfectly willing to assume that prices may be a lot cheaper elsewhere, but unless you attend Bumblefuck Egypt School of Whatever as an in-state student living at home, or are trying to compare the costs of a 1970 education to todays (just look at the comparison from early 2000s to now!), I have an extremely hard time believing something like 15-20k for an entire four year degree is within the realm of feasibility. If you're paying nothing but tuition, yeah, maybe.
I don't disagree, but at the same time most colleges are just fucking terrible at teaching you skills needed to get and do well in a job; their reward primarily is the piece of paper at the end and possibly some connections you make in the interim, not what you are actually taught. When this is brought up to people we tend to be told that university isn't job training, it's about getting an education, and that people who want that should go attend a vocational school. There is a disconnect there. People should go tens of thousands into debt to "upgrade" to a four-year degree that doesn't teach them things they're going to use in their job, but still need to make sure they choose a degree that is going to get them a job? It's not logically impossible, but it is clear evidence of a problem (that universities are happy to exploit).
* Here's a good one, and a great example of another problem. I used their "cost estimator" and told them I
had to be done in Java or C++*, that is.
And how much more effort and money would it have taken to get the project off the ground going that route? Would Facebook even exist if it had to be done in Java or PHP? Would it have entered the market at an appropriate time? There are a lot of things that derail could derail the process, especially a process begun essentially for lulz. Yeah, if somebody had promised Zuckerberg that Facebook would soon be valued in the billions he might have made other choices, but there are no such guarantees in life.
As it stands, he used a language he was clearly familiar with and for which there is ample and comparably cheap developers available and he got his product out and dominates the market. I doubt he is sitting around going "fuck, I can't believe I didn't write this is Java!" It worked out pretty damn well for him, and the rest of us get a tool to make our PHP projects better.
If you're writing a program you know will need to scale like this, yeah, maybe Java or C++ is the best choice. Beyond that I consider fretting over language instead of getting something done to be a premature optimisation.
Potential employers will care about her sexual problems? That's a major issue, but nothing at all to do with this person's blog.
Beyond that, yes, things on the Internet about you can be found and bitter exes may well write nasty things; it is part of the risk of opening oneself up to a relationship. That doesn't mean that anything written about you that you do not like is illegal and unprotected speech. As I said before, if it's harassment arrest him for harassment; if it's a restraining order issue violate him for the restraining order; and I'll add if it's libel, sue him for libel and you will have your recourse there to have the blog removed. If it is none of those things, it is an unfortunate consequence of free speech that sometimes people use it to be assholes. I bust this quote out a lot, it's one of my favorites, and I think it is relevant again here:
(I had the citation recorded as "Lord Chief Justice Hailsham" but am not sure it is accurate anymore; it may be Quintin Hogg, who served as Lord Chancellor and an MP in Britain. In any event I see great wisdom in the words.)
For what it is worth, I agree with you. However I still don't agree with the premise that ordering the blog deleted does not overstep a boundary.
If it was harassment, he should be arrested for harassment. If it was a violation of his restraining order, he should be violated and locked up. If he does it again, it should all happen again -- harsher and harsher.
To me, the blog itself was not the harassment; he could have sat around on somedouchebaghateshisex.blogspot.com forever ranting into the wind and I doubt anybody would have cared. It was the way he essentially stalked her via sending his nonsense to her family and friends that crossed the line. That being the case, that is the behavior that should be punished and stopped. His right to be a dickhead and write his drivel should not.
And you don't see the difference between a US regulatory agency looking into a merger between two American companies and an EU agency doing the same?
The EU is welcome to do whatever they please, but it does not alter the question of why. (Based on other posts it seems the answer in this case is "because Google asked them to," though that has nothing at all to do with what the Justice Department is or is not doing.)
With a highly unpredictable regime, I'm not sure "try to starve their army to death" is the right approach. Sad and selfish as it is to say, the North Korean people suffering may be the lesser of two evils in this circumstance.
Likewise, one thing that the North Korean regime has been exceptionally good at is deflecting blame. A wholly disconcerting number of the North Korean people really do believe that their suffering is because of the United States and a puppet South Korea. Furthering that suffering may well generate the anger you would be hoping to generate, but there is no guarantee that it is directed at the people it should be directed to.
Honestly, just waiting the North out is probably the best approach. I think Kim Jong-Il is regarded as pretty damn psychopathic, and I don't mean that short of its literal sense. There is simply no telling what he will do. He is also 70 years old. Short of him deciding to go out in a big bang, the amount of harm he can do, personally, is coming to a close. His children are western-educated. This is by no means a guarantee that they will be any better, but it is at least an indication that they understand the depth of the lie they are living in North Korea and has to offer at least some hope that, at bare minimum, they will be more reasonable people to deal with.
If not, once more about them and their ruling style and personalities are known, other measures can be considered. Until then, the status quo is good enough I'm afraid.
Well, that's certainly true, but you seem to be suggesting that not knowing how to use a computer or being a movie star or a wrestler means that one lacks booksmarts. This is not necessarily true.
Further, the idea that "[i]f politicians were booksmart they wouldn't need to pay analysts" is also untrue. For starters, people are not good at everything, much less expert-level at everything in the way that, you know, experts are. Second, these studies very often come back with reports that are hundreds of pages long. Particularly when we start talking about governors and presidents, who have to deal with EVERYTHING, they simply do not have the time to go through all of these things by hand. They need knowledgable people to go through it for them and give them basically the cliffsnotes version.
Jury nullification is not designed to be anything because it was not designed at all. It is an unintended consequence born from exploiting a loophole created by a legal concept too important to risk mucking around with.
In the US, if an attorney suggests nullification, they run afoul of their bar associations. Judges are prohibited from informing juries about it. A Second District appeals court decision supports removing a juror if they intend to nullify, and many judges will declare a mistrial if it has been mentioned.
The power of jury nullification certainly exists, and nobody is claiming otherwise -- but it is not an intended power, not in the US. It is a de facto power created by the loophole that a jury's findings of fact can not be re-examined and as long as they can get away with it until decision time, whatever they say and for whatever reason they say it stands.
Okay, I have noted those things. Now can you explain to me why I should care?
The vast majority of his post was statements of fact that can be proven true or false. If you have something to say about the information he provides, by all means, enlighten us.
If your complaint is that he might be paid to post it, I honestly can not be bothered to give a shit. This is not a review site where he is posting fake opinions to make a product seem better or more well-liked than it is. His motives mean nothing; whether or not the information he gives is accurate does, and that is independent of whether or not he is a shill. (Getting facts out about a product is also called "marketing," if one is not instantly out to make it be a nasty thing.)
Not that I'm defending those practices--they were silly then and they're downright stupid now--but I don't think they're quite the same thing.
"Made for Internet Explorer"-style "exclusives" were about the fact that browsers refuses to play nicely and render things the same way. Even insofar as a site could be made to look right in disperate browsers, it was a question of time/effort/cost versus reward. Especially for hobbyist sites that just wanted to toss something on the Web, that was often a real challenge. If there's no money involved, spending tons of effort on it makes little sense. And with few exceptions, websites in those days still worked pretty well in the other browsers, there were just a few, usually visual, things off about it.
Exclusives for consoles or, potentially, books isn't about the difficulty or cost/benefit of porting the works to some other platform. Particularly with books, the effort is nearly nil (and while there is a distinct effort for games it is done by the vast majority of major titles--meaning the cost/benefit is typically there). Rather, it is about the profits of one vendor over the others and whether or not they can pay you enough for the exclusive that the cost/benefit no longer works.
In other words, one "exclusivity" is because of technical and time limitations and the other is because someone handed you a big enough bag with dollar signs on it. They may have similar results, but I wouldn't say they're similar things.
I hear that swearing and acting like a tough guy on Internet forums in lieu of real life gets you all the chicks. Is that true?
A lot of trojans may operate that way (it's certainly the path of least resistance) but social engineering is not a requirement for something to be a trojan.
If it really did enter a system, have a peek around and open it up for Stuxnet why would trojan be a misnomer?
I disagree. If all the student wanted was to go into the military there are far easier ways. Simply enlisting would work and would not require college at all. (As a bonus if they want to go to college afterward they have a number of programs to help them pay for it.) If they are intent on being an officer, they would have done ROTC. Technically OCS (Officer Candidate School) does exist for college graduates who did not go the ROTC route, but that is by far the hardest path, has a very selective criteria, and there are other majors that would get you in with much greater certainty.
I'd say that a "military technologies" degree (and wtf is that, anyway?!) would be for people who are supremely interested in the military, but who who not want to join or who are physically incapable of joining. It might be a (misguided?) attempt to enter a private-sector job working with the military, or perhaps a more business-oriented career that ties in. Knowing in detail what the military does and how they do it might help you if you're trying to sell them things, as a simple example.